


Breathing Symphonies

by midnightflame



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternative Perspective, F/M, Older Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 15:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2626601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She walks with an easy, soundless gait, inspiring guilt with every step she takes. And somehow he had come to love that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathing Symphonies

**Author's Note:**

> Written way back in 2007.

She had an easy way about her. A fact that Sasuke had loathed at first, but now couldn’t imagine her without. As though she would somehow be less if it wasn’t for the way she flowed through life. Unobtrusive, yet decidedly there.

When that shift had come in his thinking, though, he couldn’t be sure. He only knew that it had occurred at some point before the birth of his son but long after Hiashi had proposed the engagement. Years. He knew that much. It had taken years for him to become settled with this aspect of his life. With her.

And just as he had hated the way she seemed to exist in this world, he had hated the way she couldn’t seem to bring herself to hate him for his disdain. Like she just knew what it was that was clawing away at his insides. He could swear he could feel her staring that monstrous thing down inside of him, still so volatile even after his brother’s death. But Sasuke could never bring himself to ask her just what exactly it was the Byakugen could see that his own Sharingan couldn’t.

It was precisely that aspect about her those eyes that could see right through his flesh and into whatever sort of soul he still had after all those years of betrayal and blood that had kept him from her bed for so long. Somehow couldn’t bring himself to scorch the damn place (marriage bed still pristinely white, just like those eyes), couldn’t bring himself to sleep in it. To touch her.

After so much time spent mired in sin for a sin’s sake. . . .how could he have?

To return to this place only to be berated not by Naruto’s anger-inspired words but by his own conscience. Because he was not anything like her. She who would seek to change a system not through blood but carefully orchestrated movements. Actions that spoken even more softly than her words when they came. She was to be the head of Konoha’s last empire.

She could also be the start of his own. However, it had taken time to accept that fact. To accept that in order to fulfill his revenge, he would need to produce an heir. It did not come easily though. When he came back, he wasn’t a child whose words could spill out recklessly, the depth of their meaning a murky mess of dreams half-formed.

Through it all – nights spent alone in a bed untouched by his hands, where dinners were spent in a silence bred by her shyness and the suffocating chill of his presence – she remained steady. Unbroken by his arrogance, his reluctance to create something close. It had been the one thing he hadn’t accounted for – creating a family implied creating ties to the very village he had sought to sever all contact with (a vain notion really because everything that had driven him lay buried in that place).

But she waited. Waited when he spent nights away on missions gradually given when betrayal seemed a thing of his past. Waited as he slept his way through recovery in a room that was very much his (dark and solemn and empty of all but memories that lay scattered over his desk). Waited until one day he came home and finally said her name.

_Hinata._


End file.
